


Cuts Like A Knife

by jazzjo



Series: Someone to Watch Over Me [3]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 21:56:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5181149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzjo/pseuds/jazzjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex would never quite forget the look that Kara gave her, chained to a table in the D.E.O. It was burned into her memory, as was the feeling that she had completely and utterly betrayed her little sister. </p><p>Or, what happened in the D.E.O. the day Supergirl was captured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuts Like A Knife

She had begged them. 

 

For days, she had pleaded and grovelled, going so far as to offer her own job up in exchange for them leaving her sister alone. 

 

The last thing Kara deserved was to be hauled in by the D.E.O. 

 

Not only was some strange shady organisation abducting her for her attempts to keep their city safe unjust, it would probably break Kara’s heart to see her sister working alongside the people who viewed her as a monster. 

 

That was all she was to them – an alien, invading their planet. They never saw what Alex had seen all those years ago, what she still saw. 

 

They never saw the scared little girl who had pulled Alex out of the house silently, opening Alex’s bedroom window just enough for them to slip out, then carrying her older sister as they floated soundlessly down onto the lawn to stare at the stars and reminisce about her home planet. 

 

They never saw the little girl who had wanted to do nothing but good. Who had passed car wrecks on the interstate and wanted nothing more than to use her strength to pry the victims of the accident from the metal deathtraps that kept them from safety. 

 

They never saw the young woman, fresh-faced and unbroken by the world, carrying an entire burning plane on her back. 

 

No one had seen that look of abject fear on Kara’s face as she had saved every passenger on that doomed flight from certain death. Alex, though, Alex would never quite forget the look she had seen on her sister’s face. 

 

She couldn’t. Not physically, not with her eidetic memory. 

 

All that begging, though, it had all been for nothing. 

 

No amount of pleading would keep them from viewing her sister – her _baby_ sister – as a threat. 

 

Director Henshaw had been damn close to having her be on the team to bring her in. She couldn’t bear it. She would have to face her own betrayal of her sister eventually, Alex was rationally aware of that much, but to have such an _active_ , participative role in her capture, she could not bear it. 

 

After all, that was what it was – a capture. Knowing Director Henshaw, it would be nothing short of that. He had never been a proponent of the softer approach, not in all the time she had worked in the D.E.O.

 

So she buried herself in lab work. 

 

She had attempted to get the director to divulge their approach, to reveal the plan of attack. At least she would be mentally prepared for that which would happen to her sister when she was brought in. 

 

If she was brought in. 

 

Alex let herself hope for that much. 

 

Honestly, she had never fully understood how much the department wanted to take Kara into custody. Not when she had joined up, not when she had moved up the ranks to become one of Director Henshaw’s most trusted and most highly esteemed bioengineers and field agents. 

 

_If you did, Alexandra, would you have taken the opportunity?_

 

Every single day, she tried to convince herself that the answer to that question would always have been a “no”, spoken with complete and utter certainty. 

 

The lab only had so much work that day that had nothing to do with the further research they were doing on Kryptonite. Alex had a limit. There were lines she would never cross. 

 

One of those lines was furthering the research on the one and only thing known to humanity that could bring to her baby sister even the slightest bit of harm. 

 

She knew the specs of every prototype of Kryptonite they had synthesised and weaponised. Every detail was burned into the very basis of her memory, including the manner in which they would affect her sister, deadly or otherwise. 

 

The very moment she had realised how much manpower and funding had been pumped into weakening and finding methods to harm the Kryptonians – her sister – Alex had made it her priority to know how much harm to come to her sister should any of the research be used against her. 

 

Hell, Alex had gone out of her way to synthesise a version of Kryptonite that weakened, rather than maimed or killed. 

 

That was the first and last she had done in the way of Kryptonite research. 

 

She would not be party in the harm of her little sister. At the end of the day, that was what Kara was to her, above all. 

 

While she had not initially wanted a younger sister, dreaded it, even, she had grown to love Kara. They still hated each other at times, but what sisters did not? Every conflict that had ever sparked between them had its roots in love, and the need to protect each other. 

 

She could not protect Kara this time. Not from the clutches of the D.E.O, nor the malicious intentions of the escaped convicts of Fort Rozz. She could not even protect Kara from herself and her self-sacrificial need to save other people while putting herself in danger. 

 

Alex might as well have painted a giant red, white and blue bullseye on her sister’s back, for all the protecting she had failed to do. 

 

Yes, young Alexandra Danvers had not wanted a younger sister; after all, she had been at an age where she had really, really hated sharing. But now, goodness, everything had changed. She had a little sister, and she wanted nothing more than to protect her from everything around her, forever. 

 

But this situation was proof enough that she had failed. 

 

By the time she had completed the lab analyses and reports for two new sets of samples of metals and other inorganic materials from sites of alien activity – the Fort Rozz criminals were getting increasingly restless, drawing attention as they left ever more obvious traces of their presence all over National City, if one knew where to look – the team tasked with bringing Kara in had only just reported into Headquarters about reaching their strike point. 

 

She had wandered around HQ for a couple of minutes, checking in on several of the newer agents as they completed their assigned work. It never hurt to intimidate them a little. Quality control. 

 

Eventually Madeline, who had started at the D.E.O. at just about the same time that Alex had, and had seen her through all the obstacles of starting at the very bottom of a food chain when neither of them had been able to speak to anyone in their lives about the work they did, grabbed her by the forearm and tugged her in front of a monitor that gave her a direct live feed of the operation. 

 

“You’ll never forgive yourself if you didn’t make yourself see how it actually went down,” Maddie had stated, matter-of-factly, “That’s just how you are. You need to know.”

 

And Maddie was right. 

 

Alex needed to see how the operation – that was all she could bring herself to call it, really – panned out. It definitely did not mean that she _wanted_ to, in any capacity. 

 

That was how Alexandra Danvers found herself staring, openmouthed, at the monitor as she saw them shoot her sister out of the sky. 

 

They had shot her baby sister out of the sky. 

  
  
Alex had seen Kara fall out of the sky, a dead drop without any resistance from her little sister. 

 

Alex had seen them shoot Kara out of the sky. 

 

Her already pale face blanched further. Alex pressed her lips tightly together, feeling the tips of her fingers go numb. By some miracle or good grace she found her cheeks blessedly dry, though she had to try valiantly to keep tears from spilling out of her eyes. 

 

They had shot her sister out of the sky. 

 

Alex squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could, pushing her hair harshly back with both hands as she tried with every fibre and ounce of her being to extricate, and destroy, the image of her baby sister limply free-falling to the cold asphalt ground from her memory. 

 

All she could see was Kryptonite-tipped arrows buried in her sister’s body, her sister paler than the time she had fished her out of the freezing water when ice had cracked under them as they had been skating. 

 

* * *

 

 

“Danvers, you’re up when the girl wakes up,” Director Henshaw ordered, gesturing towards the room in which they had deposited her sister the moment the team had returned, heavy arms in tow. 

 

_Her name is Kara._

 

Where they had chained her sister down with the one substance in the world that was able to weaken her. 

 

“There’s no need to restrain her, Director,” Alex attempted to make a case for them to not treat Kara like a criminal, “She does not mean us any harm. She means National City nothing but good. Why are we treating her as if she were one of the criminals from Fort Rozz?”

 

_She’s a hero, not a criminal._

 

“You know, perhaps better than anyone, what exactly Miss Danvers is capable of,” Director Henshaw responded, words clipped, “Those restraints are there for the safety of all of us in this building, possibly this city.”

 

_She is my sister, she is anything but the dangerous menace you make her out to be._

 

* * *

 

 

More than once, as they had kept Kara chained to the cold metal table, Alex had inadvertently allowed herself to wonder in her sister would ever wake. 

 

After all, enough Kryptonite could have weakened her enough to the point of the damage being fatal. 

 

They had shot her out of the sky. 

 

The moment Kara had stirred, Alex could only watch, allowing a sigh to escape her lips in relief. She had healed. 

 

Some rational part of Alex laughed at her fretting. Kara was just about indestructible, for goodness sake. It would take so much more than a couple of weapons laced with Kryptonite to bring her down. 

 

As she stepped towards her struggling, sluggish sister, Alex found herself held back by something. Her feet stalled and nearly tripped over themselves as she tried to move towards her sister. 

 

Eventually, Director Henshaw had personally asked for her to move towards the table, and she had no other alternative. He had exposed the secret she had kept under wraps for years, after all. She had so little left to keep from Kara. The least she could do, as a sister who had betrayed her younger sister in the most unforgivable way possible, was to make her feel less like a criminal than the department was determined to make her see herself as. 

 

Her sister was a good many things – childish, immature, idealistic, hopeful, recklessly heroic – but she was not the alien invader they attempted to make her out to be. 

 

* * *

 

 

“She doesn’t need those,” Alex stated, putting everything into keeping her voice from breaking or shaking. It was everything she could do to keep her hands from trembling as well as she undid the Kryptonite cuffs that held Kara to the table. 

 

For the first time in a good, long time, Kara’s skin was cold to the touch. The Kryptonite had certainly done its job. 

 

At first, all that registered on Kara’s face was shock. Alex could deal with shock. It was warranted, after all, for Kara to be shocked when she learned that everything she knew about her older sister’s life had been a lie. 

 

But she couldn’t live with the look of utter heartbreak that followed. 

 

Alex wanted nothing more than to protect her baby sister from the misguided actions of the D.E.O. She wanted to comfort her, because there was no doubt in Alex’s mind that beneath all of her confusion and betrayal, Kara had returned to being a scared little girl who had woken up in a foreign place, all over again. 

 

When Kara snatched her hand out of Alex’s, that almost ripped a sob out of Alex’s controlled demeanour. 

 

Kara had lain back on the table, glaring holes in the ceiling (not literally, though Alex knew better than most that she was entirely capable of actually doing so). 

 

It took every ounce of Alex’s resolve to not break down right then and there, to not apologise profusely and plead for Kara to understand, and to forgive her. 

 

The few glances that Kara spared her were withering, wrought with the pain of betrayal. 

 

She deserved that, she knew. 

 

Alex knew Kara was more than a little to stubborn to cry over her betrayal, or to show any form of weakness when she found herself in such a helpless position. She also knew that she would be hard pressed to have Kara forgive her fully any time soon. 

 

_I’m sorry, all I ever wanted to do was to protect you. This day was never meant to come. You were meant to remain under the department’s radar._

 

_So long as you were satisfied with remaining normal, I could have protected you from all this._

 

_Now, all you can probably think about is that you will likely have to protect yourself from me._

 

Maybe if she hadn’t been so determined to prove her own mettle, to be more than just Kara’s sister, or simply to measure up to her superhuman younger sister, maybe she wouldn’t have had to be party in such utter betrayal. 

 

As devastated as she was, Alex really had no one to blame but herself. 

 

And Kara knew it. 

 

Since they had been teenagers, when Kara had finally figured out what made Alex tick, Kara had known exactly what to attack to make it hurt the most. 

  
Alex was not going to deny that her words hurt. Better than anyone, Kara knew where Alex’s insecurities lay. She did not pull her punches as she had spat those words at Alex, before walking out of the D.E.O. with a flourish. 

 

But what right did Alex have to complain about the hurt, when she had hurt Kara in a far, far worse manner?

 

Pushing her hair back with one hand, Alex sighed deeply as she went back to work. She was sure that this would not be the hardest thing she had to do regarding her sister and the department. This was only the beginning. 

 

Looking at Director Henshaw’s opinion of her sister, there would be courses of action that she would have to take in the future that would be much, much worse. 

 

* * *

 

 

_I’m sorry, Kara. So sorry._

 


End file.
